Grimes hits back in photo flap

The stock photo war of 2014 escalated in Kentucky on Thursday night, as Alison Lundergan Grimes’ campaign attacked Sen. Mitch McConnell’s team for using European stock photos in three Facebook posts.

Republicans seized on an afternoon POLITICO report that the Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate released a newspaper ad featuring a picture of a Ukrainian male model pretending to be a coal miner. Grimes’ campaign says it was a mistake by its design firm that was caught before the ad appeared in newspapers.

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It turns out that an image accompanying a McConnell Facebook post about President Barack Obama’s “war on coal” in January was of a power plant in Athens, Greece, licensed from the web site Shutterstock.

“By the McConnell campaign’s logic, his support for the Second Amendment is so fake he has to rely on a hunter from Denmark and a gun from Slovenia to prove he is more than just a CPAC laugh line,” said Grimes spokesman Preston Maddock, referring to McConnell coming on stage at a conservative conference with a musket earlier this year. “Evidently Mitch McConnell’s team would rather drum up a fake scandal about an ad that did not run than admit their mistake and talk about the issues important to Kentuckians.”

The McConnell campaign laughed off the attacks as desperate, drawing a distinction between paid media and something on Facebook.

”If Alison Lundergan Grimes thinks that sorting through Facebook will cover up her inability to tell the difference between a Kentucky coal miner and a European male model then she’s in for a long election,” said McConnell spokeswoman Allison Moore. “The reality is that she supported [President Barack] Obama’s war on coal right up until she became a candidate and the European male model is a perfect symbol of her inauthentic support for Kentucky coal.”